While CES has always been the land of the TV, DVD player and mobile electronics, PC companies have been trying to make their presence felt at the Consumer Electronics Show the past couple of years. While most of the PC attention has been focused on Intel's VIIV and Core Duo announcements and Microsoft's Windows Vista hoopla, component suppliers such as Asus, Silverstone, MSI and others have been trying to make their presence felt.

Silverstone was featuring their latest case designs, including a custom, passively cooled home theater PC case, targeted mostly at the OEM market. They were also showing an 850W power supply that's about 80% efficient and the same physical size as any standard PSU. The unit also features four PCIe six-pin graphics card connectors.

Coolermaster was showing off a variety of new CPU coolers, including compact liquid cooling units, plus a few cases of their own. Meanwhile, Zalman had a new GPU cooler on tap, plus a new CPU heatsink / fan that featured a more conventional design than past Zalman coolers. Also in the Zalman booth was the company's passively cooled PC cases.

Tucked away behind the display of leopard skin laptops and tiny MP3 players, MSI had several enthusiast motherboards in display, including the latest 975X motherboards.

Meanwhile, Asus had an open suite way back in the rear of South Hall 4. One of the cooler things on display was a Core Duo capable desktop microATX motherboard featuring the 945GT chipset. Also on display was Asus's new line of LCD desktop displays. Tucked inside a glass display case was a passively cooled X1600 graphics card.

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